it's more useful to have 10 workers working shorter work weeks than 9 workers and 1 sitting at home. think of the consequences of welfare. people want purpose. more workers = more chances for innovation, more slack in the workforce..
don't do away with the electoral college, do away with superdelegates in the democratic party
by trying to control a system into pushing through a candidate (Clinton) the Democratic party became a fragile system that didn't let information about the candidate more likely to win (Sanders) move forward
While Republicans rejected Trump, its Republican party allowed the information its voters were sending, lead their decision. Despite the chaos, the result was stronger and won, it was anti fragile
don't move away from each other and self-segregate, move closer together
work under the assumption any email can be hacked and read by a foreign party--that's not to say don't use email, it could, in fact, serve as a distraction
Your current concerns may be higher tuition costs, student and car loans, perhaps you are concerned about our environment, gun control, human rights, abortion and hate speech--these are all valid concerns and represent a burgeoning political mindset.
Why are you worried about loans? Take a step back, why do you have to take out a loan?
Because college is so expensive? But I had to take out loans 15 years ago, as well. It's always been expensive. But it's more expensive now--this is true but what does this mean?
The truth is two-fold, one is that your earning power is weaker and tuition is more expensive. Cost of attending minus what you can pay + grants scholarships = loan needed
As costs increase and your earning power decreases, the amount of your loan must increase and thus the return on investment from your degree must increase (But why would the ROI on degrees increase (all else equal)? I'm not sure of any evidence that they have and if anything, as more people get degrees, you'd expect the ROI to decrease as supply increases).
So if you can't change the ROI (overall--you could choose a 'better' degree but not everyone could do so) how can you influence the other variables? How can you make more money and lower your tuition costs? Use your voice and vote. Demonstrate on campus, at your capitol and at the local social security administration buildings.
It took me years to understand this after I graduated but my earning power and tuition costs are closely tied to how early my parents start drawing social security/health benefits and how much they receive. There are other ways the government spends money that could be curtailed but the largest expenditures (now and forecast) are entitlements (social security, medicare, Medicaid, etc.).
Vote for decentralization
Demand that Congress lift the retirement age for social security for you now.
Show your grandparents you're the generation that was brave enough and forward thinking enough to tackle this issue and not steal from your children--it's a noble cause.
But don't be taken advantage of, demand that your social security contribution be adjusted for the new retirement age. This will be the key to your earnings power increasing as less of everyone's paycheck goes to an unsustainable entitlement. Retirees may have to unretire, let them take that up with the politicians that lied to them or acquiesced. Just because it's a frail old grandmother robbing your doesn't make it right--stealing from the young is not exactly a moral highground.
You will see your earning power increase now and over your lifetime. you will make good money but You will also need to save and plan for a future where you will retire at 78!
Take up the cause, unite behind a 3rd party until the other parties address your concerns
It will seem strange at first but by voting for delayed benefits, will gradually increase each classes' earnings power, lower their tuition costs (as teachers receive less in entitlements) and improve your ROI for going to college.
With a government that isn't on its way to bankruptcy you will also be more prosperous, see less hate and fights for a shrinking 'pie', you'll have a more civil society, you can tackle environmental concerns and take on the causes that are most important to you now.
The Fed traditionally restricts itself to managing the “business
cycle”—fluctuations of output around a supposed long-term upward trend.
Summers questions the very existence of a business cycle, an inherently
optimistic concept implying that what goes down must come up. When
output declines, his research shows, it never quite gets back to its
original trajectory. Productive capacity suffers lasting damage, in part
because laid-off workers lose skills.
in a dream i read it's not cyclical at all, it's chaos; i wonder if business cycles and consumer spending should be thrown into the chaos heap, or most likely many have already.
When it comes to fighting for a piece of the commission from a client’s big trade, Wall Street analysts are often unarmed.
That’s the view from
Brad Hintz, a former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. finance chief and
14-year financial analyst, who says a new chapter of the saga is
starting. As big banks overhaul how they produce and distribute
research-- using the Internet to limit access and track what gets read
-- they may finally see how much clients are willing to pay for
analysts’ work.
Hintz, now an adjunct professor of finance at New
York University’s Stern School of Business, shared his take on the
plight of analysts:
“This is
simply another chapter in the unending quest for revenue clarity in
institutional equity trading. When an institutional client executes a
trade in equities and generates commission revenue, everyone on the
floor claims his or her share. The equity block desk demands its
portion, since it has provided liquidity to the client. The derivatives
desk says ‘It’s mine’-- and points out the structured trade it recently
made for the client. The sales force points out the numerous sporting
events and lavish dinners that they provided the client. ‘We took ’em to
the U.S. Open.’ And even the quants ask for a cut, arguing that ‘their’
algos or ‘their’ dark pool are the true reasons the client is even
trading with the firm.
"Only the poor equity research staff has
nothing to prove that the commission dollar belongs to them. Research
management knows that the analysts meet with the institutional client
regularly, they know that the client’s portfolio managers are on their
research distribution list, but they cannot prove that their specific
research is being read -- or if read, acted on. Indeed, research
management relies on internal votes of client portfolio managers and the
voluntary self reporting by clients to judge the success of their
efforts.
"And this client reporting is not reliable. Research
management knows that during IPO booms, client research votes shift to
the largest underwriters and away from the rest of the Street. This
boosts a client firms’ ranking among the bulge-bracket firms and thus
allows an asset manager to capture a greater share of highly sought
after underwritings.
"And to make matters worse, only a minority
of hedge funds (which represent more than 30 percent of the total U.S.
commission pool) report research analyst usage at all. So research
management is always flying blind; measuring analyst effectiveness with
e-mail counts, telephone time logs, numbers of research calls written,
number of ‘actionable’ research calls written, number of travel days,
number of clients on conference calls and of course the annual
Institutional Investor rankings.
"It’s
not surprising that research shrinks and grows with the predictability
of a pendulum. ‘Clients don’t care; research costs us money’ goes the
mantra of investment banking. ‘Research is a leech on the compensation
pool’ is the familiar cry from traders at bonus time. But after each
decimation of research, contrite management teams decide that
fundamental research is part of the service that clients expect and the
department is rebuilt -- only to be put to the sword once again.
"Maybe this time, technology will finally provide the answer to that age-old question: ‘Whose commission dollar is this?’"
Wall Street Cracks Down on Free Sharing of Analysts' Notes
Wall
Street banks may have finally hit on a way to pinpoint the value of
analysts and squeeze more money from their research: Stop making it so
easy to share.
Bank of America Corp. has started embedding
analysts’ reports into web pages, so it can more easily restrict access
than with PDF files that are widely shared with people who aren’t paying
clients, said Candace Browning, the firm’s head of research. It’s joining rivals Morgan Stanley and
Citigroup Inc. in limiting access, and more plan to follow. The
approach also makes it easier to track analysts’ readership and
customize products for specific types of clients, according to bank
executives and consultants.
“The sell side for years has had a model where it blasts out everything it produces,” said
Michael Mayhew, founder of Integrity Research Associates LLC, which
helps investors find the research they need. “This is an absolutely
necessary next step because they have to understand what their customers
are consuming.”
The main
goal is to restore profitability to Wall Street research following a
slew of new regulations in the past 15 years, including rules spurred by
allegations that analysts touted stocks under pressure from investment
bankers. But it also may provide key data in a debate that erupts every
bonus season and job cull: How important, really, is analyst research to
winning trades and other deals?
‘Another Chapter’
“This is simply another chapter in the unending quest for revenue clarity in institutional equity trading,” said
Brad Hintz, a former chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers Holdings
Inc. who last year ended a 14-year career as an analyst. Traders often
win the credit for generating commissions on transactions that analysts
feel they deserve, he said. “Maybe this time, technology will finally
provide the answer to that age-old question: ‘Whose commission dollar is
this?’”
(For Hintz’s full portrayal of the fight over commissions, click here.)
The
first big hit to modern stock research came in a 2000 rule requiring
companies to disclose material information to all investors at once,
making it harder for analysts to break market-moving news. Then a
scandal led to the 2003 walling off of analysts from investment bankers,
who sometimes pressed them to tout clients’ stocks. A third obstacle is
unfolding, as regulators in Europe are considering ending the
commission-based model, the industry standard which compensates banks
for research with a share of an investment firm’s trading revenue.
Eliminating Analysts
The
developments have prompted many firms to eliminate analysts. Also
frustrating for executives is that a lot of research ends up in some
form on Internet platforms such as Twitter minutes after release.
Banks
and brokerages will spend $3.4 billion on their research analysts
around the world in 2017, down by more than half from $8.2 billion in
2008, according to Neil Scarth, a principal at Frost Consulting in
London. That doesn’t include costs for technology, sales and other
methods of distribution.
Money
managers cut the amount they spend on commissions by about 26 percent
after the 2008 financial crisis to $22.7 billion last year, according to
Greenwich Associates, a Stamford, Connecticut-based consulting firm.
Between 55 percent and 60 percent of those fees typically go to research
each year.
Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP also offers research products through its Bloomberg Intelligence division.
Old Habits
Investors
consume almost two-thirds of research via e-mail, according to a bank
executive who studies readership patterns and asked not to be identified
talking about proprietary data. Most others get it from platforms such
as those run by Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters Corp. that provide access
to reports from multiple brokers. Bank websites account for less than 10
percent of consumption.
While the web technology is hardly new,
banks have been slow to take full advantage of it for analysts’ notes.
Investors will still access research the same way -- through an e-mailed
link or a company website -- but what they see will change. Instead of a
PDF that could be viewed, downloaded or shared with others, they’ll be
directed to a secure Web page.
Bank of America has been tracking
clients’ habits for years through e-mails and a website where customers
can see and download reports. But it doesn’t know what happens after
they save them. Under the new system, clients must access a site to view
material that stays there, much as they would peruse a favorite
newspaper behind a paywall, according to Daire Browne, Bank of America’s
chief operating officer for global research. The pages are more dynamic
than a PDF and will have more security, making them harder to
recirculate, he said.
“You’re not accessing a static PDF, you’re
going into a website and you are authenticating,” Browne said. “That’s
the whole premise here, that you have a greater ability to control the
access coming in when it’s a living, breathing environment that we
control.”
At Citigroup, clients receive an e-mail with just a few
sentences about a report. Clicking a link takes them to a website where
they can sign in to read the rest. This lets the firm track how many
times a report has been viewed, how often clients access the system and
which analysts are most popular. The system was put in place within the
past year.
Guessing Trades
At least one money manager who
asked not to be identified said he isn’t thrilled about being monitored.
He said he’s concerned that banks might figure out his trades based on
what he’s reading. Bank of America doesn’t zero in on what individuals
view and looks only at aggregate data, according to Browne. Spokeswomen
for Citigroup and Morgan Stanley declined to comment.
Banks
also are fighting internal resistance. Analysts and sales staff have for
years made it as easy as possible for clients to get reports, according
to Mayhew. Until firms can persuade employees to change behavior, or
prohibit PDF attachments, it will be difficult to prevent sharing, he
said.
The next step, still to come for most banks, is to customize
offerings to specific clients. Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and others are
part of a group that has come up with a coding language intended to
make it easier to search reports. Banks also may tailor the reports to,
say, macro traders or stock buyers by adding or subtracting components
they find most valuable such as charts or models, according to a bank
executive.
“Over time, there is a prospect of premium prices,” Frost’s Scarth said.
‘Competitive Advantage’
Firms
also are rethinking long-accepted practices of tracking client
conversations with analysts, as well as attendance at bank-sponsored
conferences and meetings with management. UBS Group AG, for example, is
considering the amount of time spent with analysts in a model that
assigns a higher value to a 30-minute phone call than one lasting 10
minutes, according to a person familiar with the Zurich-based bank’s
policies.
“The fact is there is a lot of stuff produced by Wall
Street that probably nobody would pay for,” Scarth said. “This should,
in theory, force all research producers to specialize in areas where
they really do have a competitive advantage.”
John Sotoodeh
in a dream i read it's not cyclical at all, it's chaos; i wonder if business cycles and consumer spending should be thrown into the chaos heap, or most likely many have already.
